Neighborhood Notes - Foxhall: 14 February 2001

The Department of Works quietly got a permanent head this week: Leslie Hotaling who has been acting Director since Vanessa Burns was unceremoniously dumped. If only Mayor Williams had not narrowed his options by insisting up until now that only African-American candidates would be considered to head up departments, DPW could have avoided a long period of being in limbo. Well before last year’s snow removal debacle, Ms. Hotaling was articulating the lack of smaller trucks required to get into the Foxhall Village streets narrowed by center median strips.

Ms. Hotaling is a practical, disciplined professional with a long management track record in DC who in the last few  years has taken part in training on modernization and reforms. Several years ago she was instrumental in leading DPW’s response to the unfortunate murder of an intern, by offering trucks and crews to help clean-up the overgrown
Canal Road sidewalk that bordered the overgrown strip of federal park land where the body was found.

Credit from that time is also due to DOT’s John Payne who replaced many missing Canal Road median street lights that had been knocked down by drunks over the decades. Although John has left DOT and is now working for a private transportation firm, let us not forget it was his idea to relocate these lights from the Canal Road median up onto a repaired canal wall, out of the way of vehicles with a secondary benefit of casting light upon the towpath.

When will FHWA ever bring the design details of their new GU entrance back in front of NCPC, as required, so that residents can see if satisfactory accommodations have indeed been made for local and student pedestrians and cyclists just as well as they have for cars?

© Bob Andrew, Foxhall